Texans Are Dying Because Texas Fears 'Job-Killing Regulations'

Almost a year ago, a pesticide plant in LaPorte, Texas, nearly poisoned the entire town. As it was, it only killed four people, all workers at the DuPont facility. The only reason that it didn't poison the entire town was because the workers at the plant acted in a genuinely heroic fashion. It was four of them who died. The culprit was toxic substance called methyl mercaptan, which is used in the manufacture of a popular pesticide called Lannate. Inhaling methyl mercaptan kills you, swiftly and not in a pretty way. A worker named Krystal Wise died when she tried to unclog a defective pipe that was clogged with methyl mercaptan and threatening to burst. The other three workers – Wade Baker, and the brothers Tisnado, Gilbert and Robert – died trying to save Wise.

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LaPorte is located in an area of East Texas that is so chockablock with industrial plants that people call it the Golden Triangle. This is because of the deregulated business-friendly climate of which Texas politicians are so very proud. This is what business as usual is like in a business-friendly climate.

Neither man had paused to locate respirators or oxygen tanks stored for emergencies. They didn't know the air inside the tower was compromised. While there were alarms to alert the control room to pressure buildups in the system of pipes, critical areas of the tower lacked air monitors, which could warn workers of a gas leak. In fact, the tower always reeked of methyl mercaptan, a gas workers called MeSH, which even in trace amounts smells like rotting onions or overripe cabbage. Over time, workers got so used to the odor that they could no longer smell it. DuPont's standard training didn't emphasize the danger of MeSH as much as other toxic ingredients in pesticide production. But MeSH can incapacitate people at levels of only 40 parts per million, and at 100 or 120 ppm—akin to a drop in a glass of water—it can kill. Around the time of Wise's distress call, more than 23,000 pounds of MeSH had begun to spew into the third floor of the Lannate tower, an area with no toxic-gas detectors, as federal investigators would later find. So workers had no way to know that the air inside the tower was being displaced by poison.

Lovely.

Anyway, lost amid all the news of the last couple of weeks was the announcement by the federal Chemical and Hazard Inspection Board of its findings in the LaPorte incident. The findings of the investigation were worse than you might have expected, and I, for one, had expected them to be pretty damned bad.

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Facing about 150 people in a downtown Houston hotel, the federal Chemical and Hazard Investigation Board described a unit that routinely endangered workers and the surrounding public until it shut down after the November 2014 tragedy. Were it to reopen today, the board said, it would continue to present dangers…For instance, said board investigator and attorney Tamara Qureshi, stairwells in the unit were the main pathways for workers to move between floors, but were originally designed only as fire escapes and don't have ventilation. "The stairways were not a safe haven for workers from toxic gases," Qureshi said. Wise was found dead in one of those stairwells. Ventilation has been a focus of investigators from OSHA and the CSB since the accident, because fans on the third floor where the toxic leak occurred weren't working. Plant operators had put in an "urgent" work order to have one fixed less than a month before the 2014 tragedy, investigators said. But it turns out that even if the fans had been working, the overall ventilation system had so many problems that the leak still would have caused a "lethal atmosphere," Qureshi said. The same holds true for the plant's detector system for methyl mercaptan, the deadly chemical that leaked and caused the deaths. Investigators said there were no methyl mercaptan detectors on the third floor of the Lannate unit, where Wise first opened a valve and the chemical spewed out. Even if there had been, DuPont's alarms systems were only set to go off if the concentration of the chemical reached 25 parts per million.

Let us be clear. These were entirely avoidable deaths. If the methyl mercaptan had escaped from the plant and killed people in the street, those deaths would have been avoidable, too. But somebody, somewhere, in some boardroom, decided that was a risk worth taking.

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DuPont had been working on a five-year plan to evaluate its valves, which was due this year. But at the moment it's only 35 percent complete, and even then, "the scope of DuPont's program is not sufficient" to address all of the safety concerns, Qureshi pointed out.

The deaths were not only avoidable, they were without apparent consequence.

There is little the board can do to force DuPont to correct these problems. Unlike OSHA, the board can't levy fines or invoke any kind of formal enforcement. All it can do is vote on formal recommendations for reforms at the plant, which the CSB's members unanimously agreed to do Wednesday night. In an emailed statement, Dupont said the company "respectfully disagrees with aspects of the report and some of CSB's findings," but that it is cooperating with the agency and is working on its recommendations.

The only way these things stop is if people in the executive suites exchange their nice suits for the orange leisurewear suitable for working in the prison laundry, and/or if the company in question gets hit with a fine so huge that it is required to sell off the copy machines. But that can't happen because we don't want to "cripple" American business with "job-killing regulations." The same, apparently, does not hold for crippling American workers, or for killing the people who actually have the jobs. It is the opinion of virtually every Republican presidential candidate–and far too many "moderate" Democrats–that controlling predatory, murderous industry is a job best left to the states, like Texas. Apparently, just as the semi-monthly massacre is the price we pay for having a Second Amendment, the occasional loss of a town to preventable industrial accidents is the price we pay for having a Tenth. Freedom is a tough room.

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Even while the unit has been shut down, investigators said, they have seen releases of toxic chemicals. And just days before the deadly November 2014 accident, they found that methyl mercaptan detectors had gone off — but the incidents were never reported or investigated.